1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to mounting arrangements in general, and more particularly to arrangements for temporarily attaching exterior miniature light sets or chains and similar holiday decorations to external structures or features of a one-or multi-family house, a similar dwelling, a building, or its appurtenance.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are already known various constructions of arrangements for attaching decorations, such as sets or chains of miniature holiday lights, to roofs, roof shingles, soffits, gutters and similar external structures or features of a house to give the latter the desired festive holiday look. Such arrangements start with something as simple as double hooks that engage around gutter rims and have the decorations suspended therefrom, or large-headed nails used to nail such decorations to the soffit, or to the roof structure through the roof shingles, and run the entire gamut to sophisticated brackets and the like that are specially designed for connecting such decorations to specific types of such structures, such as to vinyl gutters only, or to metal gutters only, or to soffits only, or to roof edges only, and so on.
Of course, the simplistic solutions, which have the appeal of being quite inexpensive, have their drawbacks, such as lack of assurance that the double-hook attachments will withstand the rigors of inclement weather, such as high winds, and keep the decorations in place, as well as their inherent inability to prevent the miniature lights from swaying. In the case of fasteners such as nails that perform their attaching action due to their penetration into or through the support structure, the resulting damage to such structure may cause the roof to leak or make the soffit or similar wood structure or member vulnerable to rotting or similar destructive action.
In contradistinction thereto, the more sophisticated attaching arrangements have the disadvantage that they are too specialized and that, consequently, they are not functionally interchangeable. This, of course, means that the prospective decorator will have to obtain different types of such attaching arrangements for use on different types of structures, such as specific gutters versus soffits etc. This brings about the dangers of miscalculating the number of the attaching arrangements of the various types that are to be obtained and falling short of one or the other type in the middle of the decorating job, thereby requiring an additional trip to the store, or of having to buy many more of the attaching arrangements than what would correspond to the number of requisite attachment points. Overpurchasing the arrangements is done not so much because the decorator wishes to have such excess in order to avoid the need for having to revisit the store, but rather because the attaching arrangements of each type usually come in packages each of which includes a fixed number of such arrangements. The likelihood is that the potential user will have to purchase unneeded mounting arrangements, increasing in proportion to the number of packages required to meet the minimum requirement for the mounting arrangements of each type and to the number of the various types of the mounting arrangement needed. This becomes quite an expensive proposition.